One option is reassuring yourself that you live in a progressive metropolis, which at our own peril we sometimes imagine is a nation all its own. But New York now really is a capital of some sort. And pedestrian traffic in a sizable chunk of midtown – a neighborhood already known for gatekeeping – is closed off for the protection of the president-elect, who for most of his seventy years of mornings has woken up here too.

There’s lots being written about what next steps we should or must take to defend the values we hold dear, much of it thoughtful. We won’t add to that, but instead ask our readers, as they make their way through their lives here, to consider carefully what it means that so many people move to New York – a city we cherish for its diversity and openness – in pursuit of exactly the idea of wealth and exclusive luxury on which the president-elect has built his brand and business.

We might also remember how little resemblance the boardroom scenes in The Apprentice bore to boardrooms without television cameras. We will soon learn what happens when a fake business leader becomes a real political one, as reality begins to mirror some of our least socially-redeeming television.

None of it augurs well. For our part, we’ll continue to publish writing and images about what sort of place this city is, what it offers to who, how it came to be that way, and what it could become. We’ll do our best to avoid punditry, meaningless data journalism, dangerous trend pieces on millennials, and general smugness.